Guests of the Ayatollah

Daugherty’s flat acknowledgment left them momentarily speechless. They looked at one another, and then back at Daugherty, who smiled at them.

Then they erupted. All three of them shouted at him at once, venting their anger about the United States, the shah, SAVAK, all the primary sources of evil in their world. Here sat the personification of all they feared and despised. He would be the first one of the hostages executed, promised Sheikh-ol-eslam. No need for a trial. He admitted it!

“You’ve lied to us all along,” said Sheikh-ol-eslam. “You’ve wasted our time. You really are CIA. You’re an enemy of our country.”

Then Daugherty lost his temper and began shouting back at them, cursing them, calling them lousy Muslims and idiots. The four men sat in the strange little plastic room bellowing at one another.

“You guys don’t know jack shit about the world,” said Daugherty. “This is going to be terrible for your country in the long run.”

He felt hopelessly trapped in the web of their vicious mythmaking. The idea that his job with the CIA, in reality fairly minor and posing no threat whatsoever to the emerging government of Iran, made him the devil incarnate in their breathless cockeyed worldview, and that their ignorance might well cost him his life, made him suddenly both furious and fearless. Out spilled weeks of outrage. He had watched and listened as this un-washed, arrogant young rabble had insulted and humiliated his country and his colleagues. He was madder than he had ever been in his life and with nothing to lose he unloaded on them, resurrecting an awful extravagance of obscenity collected in military school and eight years as a marine, insulting their intelligence, their cause, their leaders, their parents, their sisters…and their culture.

“You think you’re civilized because you had civilization here three thousand years ago! Well, there’s no fucking trace of it anymore. You guys are nothing but animals!”

They were too busy with their own insults and accusations to even hear. All this anger roiled and then, as abruptly as it had begun, it subsided. Daugherty leaned back in his chair, exhausted. They had more tea.

Sheikh-ol-eslam, weary but determined, resumed questioning.

“Okay, look, we’ve got to get into this now,” he said. “We know you’re CIA, so let’s just start at the beginning. We want to know where you were trained and who trained you and who you work with in Washington.”

“Wait a minute,” Daugherty said. “All along you’ve been telling me that you didn’t care what I had done in the United States, all you cared about was what I’ve done in Iran. And here you accuse me of hurting your country, of harming your people. I’m not going to tell you what I’ve done in the United States. You only care about what I’ve done in Iran and that’s all I’m going to talk about.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam sat back and thought this over for a moment.

“Okay,” he said finally.

And they never again asked him questions about his recruitment or training. Daugherty couldn’t believe it. It was too good to be true. It eliminated a large category of concern. Everyone he had worked and trained with in the States maintained a cover, and those who had prepared him for Iran had been in and out of the country themselves in undercover roles for years. Each had contacts and cover stories he felt obliged to protect. He knew at least twenty of them. If that all remained off-limits (and it did), what a relief!

“Look, I may be a CIA officer instead of state, but I still only got here on the twelfth of September,” he said. “I still was only here for seven or eight weeks, or whatever it was. I still don’t even know the city.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam wasn’t buying that.

“You must know all the spies,” he said summarily.

“I’m a new guy,” Daugherty explained. “I’ve never done this before. No boss, no espionage boss is going to immediately give spies to an officer so newly arrived in a country he has never visited, where he knows virtually nothing of the circumstances, customs, culture, or language. The first thing you have to do is learn the city. I could barely find my way from here to my apartment behind the building!”

Their own prized captured document confirmed that he had not been in the country for long.

And the part about finding his way around the city was true, too. Ahern had given him the first two weeks just to explore. After that he had concentrated on doing his State Department cover job during the day and had started feeling his way into agency work at night. For about five weeks he had met with some of the contacts the agency had wanted him to explore. The CIA had not been actively spying in Iran for years. That was part of the problem. It was why no one had adequately foreseen the collapse of the shah’s regime. The agency had more or less ceded all intelligence work inside the country to SAVAK, since the shah’s enemies tended also to be enemies of the United States. For years, little intelligence was collected from Iran that did not originate with the shah’s own regime, who of course downplayed civil unrest and political opposition. Now, with Iran suddenly under new masters and the situation in constant, confusing flux, the agency was starting from scratch—note the reference to a “clean slate” in Laingen’s cable—and it was desperate for anyone who could help explain what was going on, anyone close or potentially close to those in power. The agency was pathetically far from being able to influence events, despite the overblown fears of most Iranians, who saw the CIA as omnipresent and omnipotent. The members of the recently resigned provisional government were now being accused of working secretly for the CIA, and the satanic agency was accused of orchestrating everything from natural disasters to civil disturbances to running a troublesome insurgency in Kurdistan. The feverish effort under way to patch together and decipher all of the embassy’s files would in the coming months “confirm” such links and send many to prison or execution.

In fact, the agency had never been so lacking in power and influence. Ahern was running an operation that consisted of himself, his secretary, Daugherty, Kalp, and three communicators—Jerry Miele, Cort Barnes, and Phil Ward, who handled communications in the embassy vault. No one working for the agency in Tehran even spoke Farsi!

Still, in his roughly five weeks on the job, Daugherty had met with a number of Iranians the agency was eager to recruit, and had even had some luck with two of them. He hoped those contacts had had the good sense to leave the country.

“You were at Berkeley,” he told Sheikh-ol-eslam. “You were in San Francisco. Did you come to know American customs and the layout of the city of San Francisco in the first week you were there? No? Well, then how should I know the customs and the city of Tehran the first week I’m here?”

His interrogators were flabbergasted and disbelieving. Why would the CIA send an officer to their country who knew nothing of Iran and who didn’t even speak the language?

“There were many Iran specialists in our government who could have come here, but they all turned down the assignment,” Daugherty said.

“Why wouldn’t they come?” asked the younger man, who seemed to take it as an insult.

“Because they were afraid.”

“What could they be afraid of?”

“They are afraid of this,” said Daugherty, lifting his bound hands.

He told them they could learn more about the CIA by reading the various books that had been published about it than by interrogating him.

But Sheikh-ol-eslam seemed to have even more information about Daugherty. In the fifth interrogation they asked him about specific nights in the previous months. Where had he been on this night? With whom had he spoken? What Iranians did he know? This was homing in on one of the few areas of local information that Daugherty felt most obliged to conceal.

So far he had been a bust as a spymaster. He had been given two Iranian agents to contact when he arrived, and one, a woman who worked in the foreign affairs ministry, did not even regard herself as a spy and didn’t appear to have access to any interesting information. The other was a military officer with access to Khomeini’s inner circle and potentially a valuable source. The agency was depositing money in a Swiss bank account for this contact, a lieutenant colonel or colonel. Daugherty wasn’t even sure of the man’s rank. The military had not yet been completely purged, and there were still some very-high-ranking officers who were pro- American. Daugherty had arranged several message drops for him, parking his car in a business district in northern Tehran and leaving the window slightly open. When he returned there would be a letter on the seat, which, when opened, looked like a simple missive, a letter written to a sister or daughter. But written in invisible ink on the same sheet was a message to the embassy. He had met with the man twice at night. They had driven